Aureal Semiconductor

Aureal Semiconductor Inc. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid-late 1990s for their PC sound card technologies including A3D and the Vortex (a line of audio ASICs.) The company was the reincarnation of the, at the time, bankrupt Media Vision Technology, who developed and manufactured multimedia peripherals such as the Pro Audio Spectrum 16.

History

In May 1996, Aureal Semiconductor was founded from what previously was Media Vision Technologies Inc. after being involved in a financial scandal that led to then-CEO Paul Jain stepping down. Media Vision incurred approximately $104 million of aggregate losses in 1995 before the company was renamed.

Aureal sustained further losses of $17 million in 1996 and $18 million in 1997.[2] After having acquired Crystal River Engineering in May 1996, Aureal worked with them to develop and market the A3D audio technology.[3] The technology was incorporated into video games, surround sound systems and sound cards.

Technologies and products

Contrary to OEM companies (such as Creative which builds, brands and sells their own devices), Aureal was a fabless semiconductor company. This changed with their final product: the Aureal SuperQuad. However, to not anger the middlemen, Aureal did no marketing of its self-branded product.

Vortex

The Vortex audio accelerator chipset line from Aureal Semiconductor was designed to improve performance of their then-popular A3D audio technology. The first member of the line, the Vortex AU8820, was announced on July 14, 1997,[4] and was used in by a number of sound card manufacturers, like Turtle Beach and TerraTec. After Aureal's release of A3D 2.0, the Vortex AU8830 (known as the Vortex 2) was announced on August 6, 1998.[5] The Vortex 2 chipset won numerous industry awards, and was used among other places in the Diamond Monster Sound MX300, which achieved near-cult status with audiophiles and gamers for the high quality of its positional audio.

Near the end of Aureal's existence, they released a Vortex Advantage budget sound card aimed at systems integrators, which ran on the Vortex AU8810 chipset.[6] Towards the end of 1999, the SQ3500 was announced, which ran on the Vortex AU8830 chipset, with the main addition being a new "Turbo DSP" daughter-board module.[7]

All Vortex soundcards are still functional with latest Windows 2000/Windows XP drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 (32 bit editions only). While Windows XP will recognize and work with the 8830 Vortex 2 chipset, there is an official Final Beta (v5.12.2568.0) available for download from a variety of sites which can be found via most internet search engines. There is also a modified version of the XP driver that can provide basic audio functionality for the Windows Vista operating system and may also function with Windows 7 beta releases.

A3D

A3D (Aureal 3-Dimensional) is the technology used by Aureal Semiconductor in their Vortex line of PC sound chips to deliver three-dimensional sound through headphones, two or even four speakers. The technology used head-related transfer functions (HRTF), which the human ear interprets as spatial cues indicating the location of a particular sound source. Many modern sound cards and PC games incorporated A3D via license from Aureal. Due to Aureal's acquisition (see below) the A3D technology is now part of the intellectual property of Creative Labs.

The technology was originally developed by Crystal River Engineering for NASA's Virtual Environment Workstation Project (VIEW). Crystal River later commercialized the technology with a series of products including the Convolvotron and the Acoustetron. Aureal acquired Crystal River in May 1996[8] and rebranded the technology A3D.

A3D differs from various forms of discrete positional audio in that it only requires two speakers, while surround sound typically requires more than four. The particular advantage of A3D is for dynamic or interactive environments such as simulations, games, video conference, and remote learning. A3D is not as effective for static productions such as movies which typically employ surround sound.

A3D uses a subset of the actual in-game 3D world data to accurately model the location of both direct (A3Dspace) and reflected (A3Dverb) sound streams (A3D 2.0 can perform up to 60 first-order reflections). EAX 1.0, the competing technology at the time promoted by Creative Labs, simulated the environment with an adjustable reverb—it didn't calculate any actual reflections off the 3D surfaces.

type	Public
traded as	OTCBB: AURL
predecessor	Media Vision Technology
foundation	November 9, 1995
defunct	September 21, 2000
fate	Bankrupt, dissolved. Assets were acquired by Creative Technology
location	Fremont, California
industry	Audio Technologies
key people	Kenneth 'Kip' Kokinakis, (President, CEO) Toni Schneider (VP of technology, 1996-1998; VP of marketing, 1998-2000)
subsid	Crystal River Engineering
footnotes	‡R1R‡

Aureal Semiconductor

History

Technologies and products

Vortex

A3D

See also

External links

References